Tag Archives: Mark Stroman

Update: Despite the efforts of Rais and Amnesty activists to stay the execution of Mark Stroman, he was executed last night by the state of Texas. But there is more work to be done in the fight against the death penalty. Learn more and take action on our website.

Mark Stroman is set to be executed in Texas on July 20, despite the best of efforts of his one surviving victim to try to spare his life. As readers of this blog will know, Rais Bhuiyan, a Muslim from Bangladesh, was shot and left for dead during Stroman’s series of attacks on Middle Eastern looking men after September 11, 2001. Bhuiyan’s efforts to halt the execution now include a lawsuit against the Lone Star State alleging that his rights as a victim have been violated.

Rais Bhuiyan is challenging stereotypes about “Muslim radicalization” every day.

You may have read about Rais on this blog before, or even participated in our online chat, but the importance of his story to our larger work fighting prejudice in a post 9-11 world can’t be overstated.

Just ten days after the September 11 attacks Mark Stroman walked into the gas station where Rais Bhuiyan was working and shot him point blank in the face with a shotgun cartridge.

Against all odds Mr. Bhuiyan survived the attack but Waqar Hasan and Vasudev Patel were both killed by Stroman in similar incidents in which the self-styled ‘Arab slayer’ sought ‘revenge’ for Al Qaeda’s assault on New York and Washington by targeting residents of his small corner of Texas with darker skin than his own.

Shortly after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, a man named Mark Stroman roamed the Dallas area committing a series of hate crimes that in his mind constituted retaliation. He murdered two men he thought were Middle Eastern (one was a Hindu from India the other a Muslim from Pakistan) and attempted to kill a third, a Muslim from Bangladesh named Rais Bhuiyan.

For the two murders, the state of Texas sentenced him to death, and he is now scheduled to be executed on July 20. Yet more killing. But Rais Bhuiyan (who is blind in his right eye because of the shot that was meant to kill him) is opposed to the execution and is campaigning to stop it. He has the support of the Dallas Morning News which wrote in its Sunday editorial:

We wish to give that campaign voice. It delivers a potent message to a nation still torn by the loss of 9/11. It resists the cycle of revenge that doesn’t stop until someone has the courage to say enough.

As Bhuiyan himself said a few days earlier: “… hate doesn’t bring any good solution to people. At some point we have to break the cycle of violence. It brings more disaster.”